The nature of our spirit determines the health of our soul and our body. A crooked spirit makes for a crooked life. We may bind ourselves for good reasons – at least in our minds. ‘Doing The Good’ will be seen as an implied bargain with God. But our religion will be to us a transaction that blights our lives. ‘I’ll do this God, so that you will do that.’ It’s ticking some kind of box. Fundamentalists have a score of small boxes. Liberals have a few large boxes. Intellectual Christians have an attic of boxes and assorted curiosities. Sons of God have God have no box. They enjoy God expressed as themselves.
The Kingdom of God is not about boxes and ticking them. The Kingdom is a state of being. It’s a relationship with the trinity. It is the belongingness of the ‘Sons of God.’ It is God manifest as you. In Jesus the Word became flesh. With Christ as your life you become a son/daughter of God.
‘You will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you’ John 14.20 NIV.
In God’s sight the manifestation of ‘the good’ is Jesus. Because of this the manifestation of Jesus is you when you live in the Spirit. What is His definition of the good as it relates it us? It is that we are the manifestation of the Christ by the Spirit. It is the interwoveness of the trinity in our being and of our being in the trinity.
To live in the law is to be religious. To live our oneness with God is to be spiritual – but not a being without substance. It is Christ come in our flesh. Christ manifesting in Bob and Mary.
BODY OF LIFE/BODY OF DEATH
We are not of the body of Christ because we cite a scripture about ‘one loaf’. We are the Body because the law and its bargains have been dispensed with. For us the compartmentalisation of Adamic religion is annulled and we and we and Father are one. One in actuality not one in abstraction. In Jesus we have a sacred life. Saturday is no more holy that Monday because every day is holy. We and our times are a living sacrament because Christ has come in our flesh. Of itself the bread and the wine are not holy. You are holy because the Bread becomes you. Whole and holy because you are the manifestation of the trinity. You are a son/daughter.
The togetherness of God is your togetherness. Not only are you one with the trinity. You are one with the creation. It is by living this out, that the new creation replenishes the earth.
An excellent definition of this kind of togetherness with the trinity is this one: ‘A fellowship and sharing so honest and open and real that persons involved dwell in one another. There is union without loss of individual identity. When one weeps, the other tastes salt. It is only in the Triune relationship of Father, Son and Spirit that personal relationship of this order exists, and the early church used the word ‘perichoresis’ to describe it. The good news is that we have been included in this relationship and it is to be played out fully in each of us and in all creation.’
LIFE IN THE SPIRIT
We have union with God. Bad religion is making pieties out of an assumed position of separation from God when the truth is that we are now one with Him. This means that much ‘religion’ is an affront to the cross and a denial of what has been accomplished by God for all.
We were made to live in God. There is no dualism in God. Jesus has brought all things together in Himself. We and our Father are one, yet remain ourselves and more to the point, we are only our true selves when we and our Father are one. Richard Rohr nails it about our united self in the following way.
“With dualistic minds it is always one or the other — it can never be both. The result is that we still think of ourselves as mere humans trying desperately to become “spiritual,” when the Christian revelation was precisely that you are already spiritual (“in God”), and your difficult but necessary task is to learn how to become human. Jesus came to model the full integration for us (see 1 Corinthians 15:47–49) and, in effect, told us that Divinity looked just like him — while he looked ordinarily human to everybody!” (1)
This is why to see Jesus is to see yourself. He is the Mirror and the one who incarnates Himself in you so that you become the manifestation of The Son as a son/daughter. The law was never the mirror. Neither are other people your mirror. Jesus is. He is who you are becoming AS YOURSELF.
(1) Rohr, Richard. The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See (p. 69). The Crossroad Publishing Company. Kindle Edition.